


He Loves Us Not

by anxiousgoat



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, F/F, Helga is a good teacher, Heroes, Hogwarts Founders Era, M/M, Nostalgia, Podcast: Fanatical Fics and Where to Find Them, Sexy Old Person, Time Travel, elderly Helga Hufflepuff, only very mild romantic talk, soulmate fail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:01:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26581819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anxiousgoat/pseuds/anxiousgoat
Summary: Once upon a time, many years ago, Helga Hufflepuff met Harry Potter, a legend before his time.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Helga Hufflepuff/Rowena Ravenclaw
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	He Loves Us Not

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a podcast, Fanatical Fics and Where to Find Them. If you like Harry Potter fanfic, this is the podcast for you!

“Oh, you want to know about the time I met Harry Potter?”

You nod eagerly.

“I’ve heard he’s going to be the saviour of the wixen world in a thousand years time!” you say. “A legend before his time.”

Helga smiles at you. She’s very old now, her face a mass of wrinkles, but her eyes are as bright as ever. Not many people know where she lives, but you came to the village recently, hearing that they needed a wix, and one of your new friends mentioned that it’s Helga Hufflepuff herself who lives in the tiny cottage on the edge of the woods.

As for the stories, they’ve been around for as long as you can remember.

“A legend indeed,” she murmurs, a distant, wistful look in her eyes. Then they snap back to you. “And a very ordinary young boy, as they all are.”

“But still,” you say. “A real live hero! Like in the stories!”

“Well, well, I’ll tell you what happened and you tell me whether he still sounds like a hero when I’ve finished.”

You grin a little.

“All right.”

“Just bring me another cup of milk, will you?”

When you’ve both settled, she heaves a little sigh and begins.

“Like him, we were very young at the time. I would have been… let me see. Sixteen? Seventeen? Thereabouts.”

“We?” you say.

“Don’t the stories say that?” She raises her eyebrows at you, and you shake your head. “We’d already known each other a few years by then, the four of us. Me, and Rowena, Godric and Salazar. We were all driven to travel and when we met, we found that we had much in common, as well as much that we differed on. That served us well in later years.”

“The school?”

“Yes. It was Rowena’s idea, of course, but for a long time at Hogwarts, our differences were what gave us strength. But that was afterwards. After we’d seen it.”

“You saw Hogwarts?”

“Oh, we did. It was supposed to be just a bit of fun, you know, but it turned into our first great adventure together.” She chuckles to herself. “We created a spell to find our one true love.”

Your mouth hangs open.

“You created a spell to do that?” you gasp. “But that must have been incredibly complicated!”

“It certainly was, and, as you’ll hear, it didn’t go quite as we had intended. A foolish thing to do in the beginning. Rowena and I found love and happiness together until she died, and it wasn’t the spell that helped us find it. But we were young. We’d heard all those romantic songs and stories and we thought finding your one true love was the entire point of life. Well, we created the spell, and then it was time to test it.” She gives you a sharp glance. “You should never test a new spell on yourself, or any human, you understand? They taught you that, yes?”

You nod, not wanting to interrupt the flow of her story. The sharpness fades from her face and she nods too, satisfied.

“Good. Good. We didn’t know any better, back then. We were so young. None of us wanted to be the last to try the spell, so we agreed to perform it on all four of us together. We linked our hands in a circle, and we cast our spell.”

She pauses then, for so long that you can’t help yourself.

“What happened?” you say.

She tuts.

“Impatience,” she says, fixing you with her bright eyes and glaring. “Well, we cast our spell, and everything went black. I could feel Rowena’s and Salazar’s hands in mine. Salazar was gripping me hard and I could tell that he was scared. Rowena… not many people could tell when Rowena was afraid, but I always could. She wasn’t then, though. Her hand was perfectly steady. And then the world came back, but it wasn’t the world we knew.”

You’re leaning forward in your seat, rapt, but her face is dreamy again. This time you don’t interrupt.

“It was Hogwarts. I know that now, though we never heard the name while we were there. We sat there, still in our circle. Godric was opposite me. I’ll always remember his face. Absolutely white, his eyes huge, and his mouth hanging open. Rather like yours is now.”

You close your mouth.

“We had arrived on a huge swathe of short grass that was all churned up and turned to mud. There were holes in the walls of the castle. One of the doors was hanging off its hinges, and there were stones and rubble everywhere. There had clearly been a terrible battle. At last, we seemed to come back to ourselves. We rose and, not knowing where else to go, walked towards the castle. He was the first person we met.”

“Harry Potter?” you breathe.

“Harry Potter,” she says. “That was the idea of the spell, you see. The first person you saw was supposed to be your one true love. I remember wondering why we had not been given different people. Afterwards, we decided it must have been because we had cast a single spell on the four of us. It had been forced to find a person who could potentially be the one true love of all four of us, different as we were, and had been forced to take us a thousand years into the future to do it.”

There are so many questions you want to ask, but you bite them all back and wait for her to continue.

“Talking was difficult at first, he spoke some strange dialect. I suppose it is inevitable, though strange to imagine, that language will change significantly in the next thousand years. Perhaps it would be more surprising if it remained the same, but we certainly didn’t anticipate it. We managed, though, and we had a long and interesting conversation with him and several friends of his, who soon joined him.”

She takes the new cup of milk you’ve brought her, noticing that her voice is getting raspy, and takes a sip.

“Thank you, dear,” she says. “They told us a little of the battle that had taken place a scant month before our arrival, though it was Harry’s friends, not he himself, who described his victory over a powerful and evil wizard who had been terrorising the lands for many years. When we revealed, by accident, that we had come to them from the past, they refused to tell us any more. Spoilers, they said. A strange word.”

She heaves a sigh and shakes her head, and you can tell that she’s almost forgotten your presence, lost instead in the past-future.

“Since they would not tell us about their world, we spoke of ours. We introduced ourselves, and you should have seen their faces.”

She laughs outright now, and you join in.

“So they knew who you were?” you say. You try to imagine legends of a thousand years past suddenly appearing in front of you. Would you even believe they were real? Well, yes, you would after this.

“Oh, yes. Some of our exploits are still well known, though most have been lost, it seems.” The laugh vanishes suddenly. “They seemed uneasy with Salazar, but it took us a long time to understand why. None of us saw his betrayal coming. Poor Salazar. He was always less trusting than the rest of us, I suppose.”

“Did they believe you were who you said you were?” you ask, wanting her to continue her story, not become lost in regrets. Anyway, everyone knows the story of Salazar. You’re not interested in that.

“Not at first.” Helga gives you a small smile. “But it was easy to prove. Salazar showed them the locket he had made the previous winter, and it made quite an impression. Naturally they began to question us. How had we come there, from so long ago? And why? We would not tell them precisely how, that didn’t seem a good idea.”

“But you told them why?”

She grins at me.

“Of course. We told them that the spell had been designed to take us to the location of our one true love, that they would be the first person we set eyes on. _That’s you, Harry,_ said Godric. He always did like to state the obvious.”

You bite your lip, enthralled.

“What did he say? Harry?”

“He looked absolutely baffled.” She laughs again at the memory. “Poor lad. I can see now how it must have looked to him, but at the time we were still thrilled at the idea of at least one of us finding our true love. And there was no denying he was very good looking. I wouldn’t have kicked him out of bed. Plus, of course, he was a hero, and who doesn’t love a hero? Well, there we were, the four of us lined up in front of him, all staring at him as though we expected him to pick one of us then and there and live happily ever after. Godric was practically drooling, and Salazar was wringing his hands the way he does – did – when he was really eager about something. Rowena, of course, was completely dignified. She always was.”

She pauses and laughs again.

“What did Harry Potter say?” you demand eagerly. “Did he want one of you? You were famous, after all, in his world. And I’ve heard you were all very beautiful when you were young.”

Helga fixes you with another of her sharp, piercing looks, and you blush.

“When you’re a little older, young wix,” she says sternly. “You’ll learn that beauty comes in many forms, and youth is not required.”

“Right,” you mumble. “Sorry.”

She snorts.

“Well, what do you think? Would you choose a wix to be your true love who was a legendary figure from a thousand years ago, if they were beautiful?”

You open your mouth to say of course you would, but then you think again. You don’t really know how old most of the stories you hear are, but it might actually be quite unnerving if one of the heroes just appeared to you and told you you were their true love.

“Probably not,” you admit.

Helga gives you a nod.

“Good,” she says. “Always think about a thing at least twice. More times, if you can manage it. You’re right, of course. He stared at us and then spent a while asking if we were serious. Godric – of course it was Godric – kept saying, _yeah, yeah, you can just choose one of us, you know, it doesn’t have to be all of us,_ and then he’d laugh. And Rowena was staring at him with that look she’d get, as though she was opening you up with her eyes and studying your insides, and saying, _the spell brought us a thousand years into the future to find you, you must be something really special._ Salazar was already flirting with a very sweet looking fat boy, and I’d realised how ridiculous we all looked and couldn’t stop laughing. We weren’t at all impressive.”

You can’t help giggling at the picture she paints.

“So, after he realised you were serious?” you prompt.

“Oh, well,” Helga shrugs. “He was very polite about it. He was already with someone. Wasn’t sure whether he was his one true love because they’d only started dating last week, but he had a lot of feelings for him and really wanted to make it work. It was this skinny blonde boy who hardly said a word the whole time we were there. Can’t remember his name now.”

“Wow,” you say softly. “Do you think they made it?”

“Who can say? I like to think that they did, though. After Harry had explained that, the blonde boy kissed him. If nothing else, they were certainly attracted to each other.” She pauses to give a very dirty laugh. “We all knew that there was no way Harry Potter was going to be our one true love after that. Even if he didn’t stay with that boy, he wouldn’t choose one of us. He didn’t even know us, how could he have feelings for us? I think that’s what triggered the end of the spell, us realising that it was never going to happen.”

“And you got sent back here?”

“We got sent back, yes. Right back to where we’d left from. Rowena’s apple core hadn’t even gone brown. And that was it. That’s how we met Harry Potter.”

You sit back, digesting everything she’s told you. After a minute, you realise that she’s watching you closely.

“So,” she says. “What do you think? Was he a hero?”

“He didn’t act like one,” you say. “The heroes in the stories are all rich and powerful, and beautiful women fall at their feet. I suppose he must have been powerful, but he didn’t act it, and he just wanted to be with that skinny little boy. But he still defeated the evil wizard, didn’t he? The one who’d been terrorising the lands for years. So I think he was a hero.”

A slow smile spreads across Helga’s face.

“I think so, too. The world will be lucky to have him.”

And you sit there together in the sun, on the bench by Helga’s cottage door, looking at her vegetable patch and thinking of heroes.


End file.
